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Investigating sighted users' browsing behaviour to assist web accessibility

Published: 13 October 2008 Publication History

Abstract

The rapid advancement of World Wide Web (Web) technology and constant need for attractive Websites produce pages that hinder visually impaired users. We assert that understanding how sighted users browse Web pages can provide important information that will enhance Web Accessibility, especially for visually impaired users. We present an eye tracking study where sighted users' browsing behaviour on nine Web pages was investigated to determine how the page's visual clutter is related to sighted users' browsing patterns. The results show that salient elements attract users' attention first, users spend more time on the main content of the page and users tend to fixate on the first three or four items on the menu lists. Common gaze patterns begin at the salient elements of the page, move to the main content, header, right column and left column of the page and finish at the footer area. We argue that the results should be used as the initial step for proposing guidelines that assist in designing and transforming Web pages for an easier and faster access for visually impaired users.

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Cited By

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  • (2016)What do users see when health information with different levels of sensitivity is presented on Facebook?Proceedings of the 79th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Creating Knowledge, Enhancing Lives through Information & Technology10.5555/3017447.3017596(1-4)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2016
  • (2016)What do users see when health information with different levels of sensitivity is presented on Facebook?: Preliminary findings with eye tracking techniquesProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.2016.1450530114953:1(1-4)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2016
  • (2015)Exploring Current Accessibility Challenges in the Multilingual Web for Visually-Impaired UsersProceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2740908.2743010(871-873)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
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cover image ACM Conferences
Assets '08: Proceedings of the 10th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility
October 2008
332 pages
ISBN:9781595939760
DOI:10.1145/1414471
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 13 October 2008

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Author Tags

  1. eye tracking
  2. visual impairments
  3. visual perception
  4. web accessibility

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Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2016)What do users see when health information with different levels of sensitivity is presented on Facebook?Proceedings of the 79th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Creating Knowledge, Enhancing Lives through Information & Technology10.5555/3017447.3017596(1-4)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2016
  • (2016)What do users see when health information with different levels of sensitivity is presented on Facebook?: Preliminary findings with eye tracking techniquesProceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology10.1002/pra2.2016.1450530114953:1(1-4)Online publication date: 27-Dec-2016
  • (2015)Exploring Current Accessibility Challenges in the Multilingual Web for Visually-Impaired UsersProceedings of the 24th International Conference on World Wide Web10.1145/2740908.2743010(871-873)Online publication date: 18-May-2015
  • (2013)Experiential transcodingProceedings of the 10th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility10.1145/2461121.2461134(1-4)Online publication date: 13-May-2013
  • (2013)Eye tracking analysis of user behavior in online social networksProceedings of the 5th international conference on Online Communities and Social Computing10.1007/978-3-642-39371-6_13(113-119)Online publication date: 21-Jul-2013
  • (2013)Visually Impaired User's Navigation Experiences in FacebookThird International Visual Informatics Conference on Advances in Visual Informatics - Volume 823710.1007/978-3-319-02958-0_71(788-796)Online publication date: 13-Nov-2013
  • (2012)Back navigation shortcuts for screen reader usersProceedings of the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility10.1145/2384916.2384918(1-8)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2012
  • (2012)Aural browsing on-the-goProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2207676.2207715(277-286)Online publication date: 5-May-2012

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